Sat.Apr 15, 2017 - Fri.Apr 21, 2017

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How MakeSpace Recently Closed $30 million in New Funding

Both Sides of the Table

Just over a year ago I wrote about how MakeSpace had raised $17.5 million in capital to build out its operations in 4 cities: New York City , Los Angeles , Chicago and Washington D.C. I pointed out that the storage market in the US alone is ~$30 billion / year and there is no dominant provider — the largest player has < 10% market share. If you have a storage need in one of these cities please consider checking out MakeSpace.

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Creative Ways To Improve Your Customer’s Online Experience

YoungUpstarts

In e-commerce, retaining customers is essential to the survival of your business. It has long been known that keeping a customer is much cheaper than acquiring a new one, as those customers tend to be far more receptive to sales and promotions after they have made an initial purchase with you. Retaining a customer involves keeping them engaged, anticipating their needs, and making sure your brand stays at the top of their mind whenever they are thinking about purchasing again.

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How Future-Proof is Your Company (and Your Career)?

Startup Professionals Musings

When you are growing a business, it’s hard to find time to focus on anything but the crises of today. Yet if you don’t spend some resources preparing for the changes in the marketplace we already know about, there may be no tomorrow for your business. In my years of mentoring and advising business leaders, I find that real planning for the future always gets the short shrift.

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10 Ways To Build Smarter Landing Pages

YFS Magazine

Do your landing pages convert? Many business owners and digital marketers drive potential customers away due to poorly designed websites and landing pages.

Design 106
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Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in

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How to Set up Payroll As a New Employer

Up and Running

When you own a business, you are in charge of hiring employees. Top-notch employees can help you streamline business processes, add innovative ideas, and grow your business. Before you start worrying about a candidate sourcing strategy or hiring your first employee, you need to have a little understanding of payroll. Most business owners are experts in their industry, not payroll.

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The Best Way To Avoid A Tax Audit

YoungUpstarts

by Samuel Brotman, founder of Brotman Law. Tax season is coming to a close. Hopefully, you’ve already filed for the previous year or will be done soon. If you have recently started your own business, then you should know the process of filing taxes will be more strenuous than usual. You need to be especially adamant about checking all your figures properly to ensure you are paying your fair share and not omitting any crucial information.

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3 Things Online Retailers Can Learn From Brick And Mortars

YFS Magazine

Online retail is the future — we all know that. But don’t count traditional brick and mortar stores out just yet. Here's why.

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Looking for your summer internship? Look no further.

Austin Startup

It’s getting warmer here in Austin and that can only mean one thing–summer is right around the corner, and with summer comes summer internships. Check out which Capital Factory startups are looking for you to join their team! Thrillbox Thrillbox is an immersive media analytics platform that provides distribution tools for content generators, advertising agencies, vendors, and networks.

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4 Ways To Trade Effectively Online

YoungUpstarts

If you have ever considered beginning to trade stocks online, now is perhaps the best time to jump on the band wagon. The global stock markets have been performing well for the least decade. The array of technology tools at your disposal is rather impressive, putting a wealth of information right at your fingertips. In fact, you can become a trader in the comfort of your own home, setting your own hours to monitor potential buys and sells.

Stock 113
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What's After The Gig Economy? The Talent Economy

Transformify

The demand for top talent is monumental, and the process of finding and hiring the best workers can be excruciating. There are many marketplaces on the web where one can go to find talent, but how do you know that their work is quality? Reviews aren’t always reliable, and there is stiff competition on many gig platforms, making the prices undercut, the stakes lower and the work shoddy.

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Day 2 for enterprise technology?

deal architect

In his annual letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos writes “I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades.” “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death….To be.

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How to run a Demo Day pitch event

Austin Startup

I’ve run more than 100 demo days and have learned the hard way what to do and what not to do. Follow these tips to make sure your event runs smoothly and your startups look their best! Participant Instructions Be draconian strict about the slide format. Make everyone follow it and don’t let them make changes at the last minute. Here are the instructions that I send to the people who are pitching: Be visual.

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Smart Entrepreneurs Favor People-Centric Leadership

Startup Professionals Musings

Every business needs repeatable processes to grow and thrive, but modern business processes need the right people to make them efficient and productive. In addition, today’s customers judge a company by perceived people relationships through social media, phone conversations, and sales experiences. The right people make productive processes, not the other way around.

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Building Product in a Saturated Niche [Traction Podcast #39: Ellen Chisa, Lola]

View from Seed

Ellen Chisa is VP of product at Lola , a travel company combining the human element of travel agents with smart technology. While some entrepreneurs build their products in markets that feel wide open for the taking, travel is one of those industries with tons of noise and competition. So how does one gain a foothold? How do you break through, build something BIG and DIFFERENTIATED?

Product 184
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9 Online Funding And Financing Resources For Struggling SMEs

YoungUpstarts

Whether you are just beginning your entrepreneurial journey or you have trod the business ownership path for years, you should know the golden rule: Your business needs money. To buy and maintain equipment and supplies, to support your staff, to build your products, and to keep your dreams alive, you desperately need cold hard cash. Unfortunately, cash isn’t always that easy to get, especially if your business is struggling to survive.

Finance 180
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Optimizing the SaaS Funnel from Top to Bottom

For Entrepreneurs

In my talk at the 2017 SaaStr Annual conference, the goal was to offer a simple model of a SaaS business and highlight key areas for optimization within the SaaS funnel. Watch the video presentation to learn the key levers a CEO can pull to make the greatest impact to their business. (video from SaaStr Annual 2017).

Video 153
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5 Key Ingredients Make A Happy Content Entrepreneur

Startup Professionals Musings

Building a startup is hard work for low pay, it’s risky, and it requires total responsibility to make it work. Yet, many entrepreneurs are the happiest people I know. On the other hand, I know many unhappy individuals who are always partying, have minimal commitments, and little responsibility. I suspect the real parameters of happiness have eluded these people.

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How not to be as stupid as this brand

The Next Web

I’ve always wanted to own real estate. At one time, I owned a small property in Jacksonville Missouri. I bought it without ever seeing it, as an investment opportunity. Four years, a foreclosure, and a lot less money later, I learned my lesson. I’m now in the habit of picking up another kind of real estate; I’m what you might call a domainer. A domainer is someone who buys, for whatever reason, a domain name on the domain aftermarket or possibly even hand registers it.

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5 Important Email Marketing Tips That Will Benefit Your New Business

YoungUpstarts

If you have recently started a new online business you will be looking at ways to try and promote your website to give you an advantage over your competitors. One of the many marketing ploys that online businesses use is to take advantage of email marketing campaigns to drive traffic to their sites to give them more potential clients, and you can do the same.

Email 168
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Support Startups for Net Neutrality

Feld Thoughts

The new leader of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Chairman Ajit Pai, has said he wants to roll back existing net neutrality rules that prevent big cable companies from discriminating against online companies and services. Congress is lining up behind him. Engine Advocacy , Y Combinator , and Techstars are organizing a letter opposing these actions, signed by startups, investors, accelerators, incubators, and entrepreneurs.

.Net 136
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5 Solution Domains Suggest A Wealth Of Startup Ideas

Startup Professionals Musings

Potential startup founders are always looking for ideas to implement, when they should be looking for problems to solve. Customers pay for solutions, but there is no market for ideas. I’m often approached by people with a “million dollar idea,” but I haven’t seen anyone pay that for one yet. Equally often, I see startups who are on the road to implementing an idea, but haven’t figured out what problem it solves – the business plan waxes on eloquently for 20 pages about how great this product and

Startup 139
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Time for automation PRAGMATISM

deal architect

All of last year as I was writing Silicon Collar, I saw two wildly different perspectives.

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How To Establish Proper Workplace Safety Protocols

YoungUpstarts

As a small business owner you know that you need to keep your employees safe for ethical and legal reasons. You don’t want to lose great employees because they feel unsafe in the workplace or get hurt on the job, but you also don’t want your business to be liable for an accident and get caught up in legal fees and court proceedings. Every business is different, so start by determining workplace risks in your industry and space.

Employee 145
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Startup Xpenditure turned down 20 VCs, but for what?

The Next Web

In the startup world, venture capitalists can find themselves treated as demigods. Feted by startup founders, by the media and by government, VC’s wield power, influence and, most importantly, money. Alternatives to VC rounds are rarely considered. It’s expected that Series B follows A, and A follows seed. For a young startup ‘VC-funded’ is seen as a badge of honour to attract new employees and investors.

Startup 134
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4 Ways To Make Profits Part Of Your Growth Strategy

Startup Professionals Musings

A question that I still hear debated often is whether a new startup growth strategy should focus on user count or profits. First of all, the glory days of “dot.coms” are gone, when investors “didn’t care” about profitability, and all the big money was focused on user count growth. In the long run, everyone wants both profitability and user growth, but the question is which comes first.

Widget 137
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Just Finish It

Feld Thoughts

An exec at a company I’m an investor in sent this to me this morning. Does this feel like your life at your company? I’m an enormous fan of Eric Ries and The Lean Startup. His, and Steve Blank’s, thinking and writing changed how we approach startups. However, the bright shiny object syndrome is alive and well in StartupLand and, when conflated with MVPs and fail fast, often results in misery.

Boston 118
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Four Habits To Help You Make Better Decisions Now

YoungUpstarts

by Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, author of “ Problem Solved: A Powerful System for Making Complex Decisions with Confidence and Conviction “ We all grow up to be decision makers. Yet somehow there’s no well-established way to make high-stakes decisions well. But it can be messy and overwhelming to figure out how to solve thorny problems.

Framework 138
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How I Turned My ‘Anti-Launch’ Into Six-Figure Success

YFS Magazine

When it comes to launches in business, most people prefer convention and tradition. It's safe. But safe didn't earn me six-figure success.

Product 140
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If You Don’t Ask For It, You Won’t Get It!

Rembrandt Communications

4 Secrets About Running Your Own Copywriting Business You Rarely Hear Secret #3: If you don’t ask for it, you won’t get it. By Melanie Rembrandt “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” states the famous hockey player, Wayne Gretzky. And this is the perfect quote to reveal my third secret about running […]. The post If You Don’t Ask For It, You Won’t Get It!

PR 100
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Announcing our next meetup: Data-Driven Marketplaces, San Francisco, May 16

Version One Ventures

Back in October, we hosted our first marketplace-themed meetup on the topic of The Holy Grail of the Marketplace: The Virtuous Cycle. More than 75 marketplace founders and investors attended and made it a great evening. In case you missed it, you can read some of the key takeaways from the evening’s talks, including a fireside chat with Boris and Uber’s Andrew Chen; growing a B2B marketplace with Shippo’s Mikhail Ledvich; Slava Rubin describing how Indiegogo grew its business ; and Anthony Ma

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How Your Health Impacts Your Business Success: Three Fundamentals To Obtain Clarity In Thinking

YoungUpstarts

by Michael S. Melfi, author of “ The Simple Secrets of Being an Entrepreneur “. Many studies have been done correlating how performance impacts success. There are those who subscribe to the fact that those with behaviors around a healthy mind and body are more likely to be successful. So why and what can you do to take advantage of it? Rest. When you take the time to rest the body there is a direct correlation to one’s ability to be creative and innovative.

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How Ashley Stewart Bounced Back From Bankruptcy

YFS Magazine

Three years ago, thick clouds of bankruptcy loomed over
 the plus-sized womenswear retailer, Ashley Stewart. Here's how CEO James Rhee turned things around.

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Could you be the next Ford, Jobs or Musk?

Berkonomics

Well, it’s a fair question. Note that none of these three famous innovators were inventors like Thomas Edison, but visionaries who find a new marketplace or niche – or how to reach the mass market in new ways. Leaders and companies that innovate new products, services and methods of delivery are the ones that stand out in a crowded business world, especially when attempting to gain recognition among the throngs of competitors visible on the web.

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Introducing Our New Partner – Chris Moody

Feld Thoughts

We are excited to announce that Chris Moody is joining Foundry Group as a partner. When we started Foundry Group in 2006, we were very clear that we were not going to build a legacy venture capital firm; one meant to outlive its founders. There would be no generational planning, no transitions to younger partners, and no senior partner hold-outs who would hang onto economics well after they had stopped working.

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Business Milestones That Deserve A Gift

YoungUpstarts

by Lea Schneider. Building a successful recognition program becomes a way to let employees know how they are doing. Everyone loves a pat on the back, and they shouldn’t need to wait until they flip over the calendar and see it’s Employee Appreciation Day to get one. If you need a push to set up a recognition program, keep in mind that Harvard Business Review reports 69 percent of employees say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were better recognized.

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6 Ways To Achieve Happiness And ‘Flow’ As An Entrepreneur

YFS Magazine

Are you in your flow? If not, here’s a look at six ways to gain more productivity, creativity, energy, and happiness in life and business.